Even if all the heavens were parchment, and all the forests quills,
If all the oceans were INK, as well as every gathered water,
If all the earth's inhabitants were scribes and recorders of INITIALS....

Friday, January 08, 2010

Songs of the Plagues of Egypt

I cannot enter into Sefer Shmot without being swept up by the inexorable rhythms of Natan Alterman’s Shirei Makot Mitzrayim (Songs of the Plagues of Egypt). This extended poem cycle was first introduced to me three years ago by Hillel the Younger, who gave me the precious gift of a first-edition copy with an inscription (in Hebrew) that haunts me to this day:

Ilana! Although the language of our communication is English, it would not be appropriate to dedicate a book by Alterman in a foreign tongue. Remember always that beneath every cry of freedom on Pesach lurks an Egyptian cry that does not find its place. May your reading be pleasant and fearsome—H.M. (Jerusalem, the Holy City, Shvat 5767)

Since then, I have picked up this book each year on the eve of Parshat Shmot and tried to wrap my mind around its complex imagery, its tense dialogue, its drive to inevitable destruction. The poem vividly and terrifyingly depicts the Egyptian experience of the ten plagues in Egypt. As Professor Ariel Hirshfeld has explained, Alterman, who wrote and published this poem during the Shoah (1944), turns the plagues into a parable of destruction. In the opening poem, we are introduced to the Egyptian city of No-Amon, which is soon to be convulsed by a series of plagues that unfold with constant regularity, climaxing in the plague of the firstborn. This introduction is followed by a sequence of ten highly regular poems, each with six stanzas of four lines, corresponding to each of the ten plagues. In Alterman’s poems, the plagues are not just physical disasters, but also a gradual erosion of the mental state of Egyptian society. Blood, notes Hirshfeld, is not necessarily water that has turned to blood, but rather the color red which floods No-Amon with conflagration and carnage.

Throughout the poems, we hear the direct dialogue between an Egyptian father and his firstborn son, who bear witness to the terror around them. Their dialogue, as I noticed for the first time this year, is strikingly reminiscent of the language and tone of Goethe’s ballad Der Erlkönig, about a boy assailed by a supernatural being as his father carries him home on horseback, most famously set to music by Schubert:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e40Mm8baD7A(Has anyone else noticed this parallel between Alterman and Goethe, I wonder?? And lo and behold, I just discovered – it was Alterman who first translated this ballad into Hebrew!)As in Goethe’s ballad, the poems are shaped by the increasingly fearful cries of the son to his father, and the father’s faltering responses. “My father, my father,” cries the son in Goethe’s ballad, “the Erlkönig is grabbing me now! He will do me harm!” Likewise, in Alterman’s tenth poem in the cycle, the firstborn son, his face suddenly pale, calls out: “My father, where is my father? My bed is darkness.” The boy’s father answers him with a testament to the enduring strength of man: “My firstborn, my firstborn son! Darkness will not divide us, because father and son are linked by the tangles of darkness.” The concluding poem that follows the cycle of ten, “Ayelet,” ends with this glimmer of hope. The poem invokes Ayelet HaShachar, the last star seen before dawn, and appeals to the human ability to maintain hope in the face of pain and destruction.

After reading a brilliant d’var Torah by Rabbi Benny Lau dramatizing the Egyptian experience of the Israelites in their midst, I was inspired by my annual re-reading of Alterman to translate two sections into Hebrew: a part of the introductory poem, and the blood poem. May your reading be pleasant and fearsome!

En Route to No-Amon

No-Amon, with your axes of ironYour gates, uprooted by nightThey will come, plagues of Egypt, upon youTo mete out to you justice by night.

No-Amon, then it rose to the moonThe first cry, with no one to hear,And the strong man who ran to the gatewayCollapsed, while still running, from fear.

Shrouded in cries, the king's cityTossed forth in a wondrous hurl.From chambers of grandeur to salt grainsFrom crown down to rags cast aswirl.

Among oft-told traditional stories,Your cast-aside story burns fierceLike a far-afield great conflagrationPast the thick clouds of time that you pierce.

Like the memories of sin, retribution,Like a shirt steeped in red-blood libationYou rose-crept, with no mold encrustationTo the first of the paths of the nations.

1. Blood

Your night revealed, Amon, the stranger’s star aboveAnd shown in light of fire, the face of wells and shores.Entranced Amon you rose, a blood-red diamond stoneFrom tresses of a maid to pennies of the poor.

As scarlet strikes the faces of those who sleep and wakeThe maiden’s braids fly downward, like twine that ties the wellThe lashes of all flesh flash flames. Through burning lips,My Father, cries the son. Firstborn! he sounds, a knell.

My Son, my Firstborn Son, the water’s turned so redPure blood poured out like water, and water poured like blood.The well has depths of darkness, the beast – red eyes that flash.For silent is the city, convulsed not in the flood.

My Father, is there no end to parched lips and to thirst?The stranger’s star, Firstborn, shines forth above the land.The waters, Father, rise, like fire in our jugs,Our blood is redder, Son, and we are in their hands.